War Story
by The Black Sun's Daughter
Summary: Separation training sends more soldiers into psych than active duty. Becker and his dæmon Nike are certainly justified in being a little anxious about being recommended for it, until they are told a story by the most unlikely of people.


**A/N: Nike is pronounced like Nikki, and is the name of the winged Greek goddess of victory. _Not_ the shoe brand. Just for clarity's sake.**

* * *

When Becker walked into the professor's office, he wasn't surprised to find Cutter and Dìonadair already there, even though they weren't strictly supposed to be working yet. Nothing could keep the Scotsman out of the ARC indefinitely, it seemed, not even Jenny.

Cutter lay on his back on the floor, staring up at the sweeping lines of his matrix, which was only halfway rebuilt; dozens of long silver tubes lay stacked up haphazardly in the corner, waiting to be added into the construct. The rest of the ARC was bounding back from near-destruction with an incredible resilience that surprised Becker, considering how seemingly mismatched the people working here were, the number of conflicting personalities that should've made teamwork impossible. "I thought you were supposed to be home," Becker said as he walked around the matrix to sit on the sofa. Nike left his shoulder – she was too heavy to sit on his shoulder for very long – to perch on a shelf just above and to the left of his head.

"Mm. Got bored." Curled up in a snug ball of dappled fur on Cutter's office chair, Dìonadair chuckled softly.

Becker nodded, tapping one finger against his thigh, his only nervous tick; the question was burning in his mouth, but he wasn't sure how to ask. Nike stared at him hard, yellow eyes laser focused on him. Sighing he said, "Cutter, I have something that I wanted to – well, _we_ wanted to ask you – "

"You want to know why I recommended you for separation training?" The Scotsman kept a straight face when he said it, but there was a slightly amused note to his voice when he spoke.

"Yes, sir," he replied, grateful that he didn't have to say it out loud. He had seen the note in his file when Lester spoke to him about it, hand penned in a slanted, nearly illegible scrawl, and it had itched him ever since.

Separation training sent more people to psych than active duty did. It was reasonable that he be nervous about it. He knew that Cutter and Dìonadair had gone through separation training, though he wasn't exactly sure when or how. It hadn't happened during his time in the ARC, or it would've been in his personnel file. Before then, Cutter had been a teacher, and sanctioned separation lots were only available for government use, far above the pay grade of a college professor. And yet, when the ARC was burning, Dìonadair had come out of the wreckage alone, ordering Becker and a medic to follow her, because Helen had a gun and was off her rocker. The crazy bitch shot him before they arrived, but they'd been able to hold him together long enough to get him to a hospital. None of the team left him alone during his stay, either, one of them always with him. The show of protectiveness had solidified Becker's respect for the team.

After a moment, the professor sat up, moving slowly and somewhat stiffly. By all rights, he should have still been home, because it was another few weeks of physical therapy before his doctor wanted him back to work. But trying to tell Nick Cutter what to do when he didn't want to do it was about as useful as arguing with a brick wall. Standing up, he shooed Dìonadair out of his chair and sat there; the Highland lynx dæmon stretched imperiously and instead curled up on a stack of unfinished paperwork. For the longest time, Becker had supposed she was some kind of domestic cat, as she wasn't much larger than one, but Hart had corrected that misconception.

Again, Becker wondered about Cutter. Looking at him, it was easy to imagine the slightly odd college professor puttering about in a cramped office on some busy university, but time and again, he showed these odd flashes of a different person, someone much rougher around the edges, with darker shadows than one might think. Dìonadair was like that herself, appearing to be a domestic animal when being a wild one in reality.

After a moment of quiet, Cutter said, "There's plenty of reasons that I could give you, but I imagine you've thought of most of them yourself, the traditional reasons.  
Dæmons can carry messages, locate others if you're separated from the team, search for creatures, all that shite."

"But that's not the reason _you_ had?" Becker queried hesitantly.

"No."

The professor was silent for a moment, and Becker itched to ask him just what his reasoning really was, but Nike chittered her beak at him, advising him to be quiet. Cutter glanced over at Dìonadair, and the sleek feline gazed back at him for a moment before dipping her head in a nod. "Did you know that when I was a lad, I had a juvenile record as long as my arm?" he asked.

Becker's eyebrows rose at the non sequitur then a little more at the idea of Cutter being a juvenile criminal. "What? No."

The other man nodded, lips twisting in a wry smile, but there was something darker behind it, something bitter. "Oh, aye, believe it. My father...well, once he hit the bottle too hard, he'd start hitting other things. Myself and my mam included, and my siblings. My older brother, Michael, he died when I was fourteen. Auto wreck, some drunk ran him off the road. Of all my family, I think he was the person I was closest to, other than Mam. After he died, my father's drinking got worse, and so did the things he'd do to us. On worse days, he'd lay out a switch, a belt, and a cane and make one of us pick what the others were hit with."

The idea made him feel faintly ill. Nike's feathers bristled slightly, talons flexing on her perch. His own father hadn't always been parent of the year, and when Becker got in serious enough trouble, he'd get a caning, but his father would never hurt him _just_ to hurt him, or raise a hand to his mother.

"So, I was fourteen, dealing with a living hell at home and grieving for my brother, but I couldn't tell anybody else about it. I was afraid of my father, and...so long as nobody else knew, I could pretend it didn't happen, that it was just some bad dream. Once I told someone, it would be real, and I couldn't do that. I was full up to the ears with frustration and anger and sadness, and I started doing things, stupid things, to let off some steam. First it was just cutting class and smoking fags with my mates, but then it got worse, and pretty soon it was genuine criminal behaviour."

Cutter paused, drumming his fingers against the arm of his chair. Dìonadair rose, stretched, and padded over to spring agilely into his lap, pushing her head beneath his other hand. He glanced up at Becker as if remembering the captain was there, and his pale eyes searched Becker's expression, as if trying to gauge his reaction. This was more than Becker had _ever_ heard Cutter say about himself, and he had unknowingly leant forward with elbows on his knees, listening eagerly.

"Anyways. In that time, Dìonadair had been in the form of a marten, and everyone else supposed we had already settled. But we hadn't. We didn't feel...right...in our skin. Like wearing clothes too small. We felt _wrong,_ and no matter what we did, no matter what we destroyed or what laws we broke or what we stole, it didn't help. We always felt wrong. And then...something happened that made us realise that what we were doing wasn't the way we wanted our lives to turn out." Here, the professor's eyes darkened, and he looked away, staring ahead without seeing, as if seeing the past, and he scrubbed his hands against his trouser legs.

"What happened?" Becker asked before he could stop himself. Almost instantly, something in Cutter's eyes shuttered away, as if some door had closed to hide whatever lurked behind it; Dìonadair went very still. Realising that he'd stepped over some sort of line, he hastily added, "I'm sorry if I – it's obviously personal, sir, you don't have to answer, I shouldn't have – "

Cutter waved a hand, stopping his embarrassed yammering. Becker didn't yammer very often, but sitting in a room with a man that he realised he knew very little about, he felt less like a captain and more like a cadet being told war stories by his commanding officer. "It's alright, but...thank you. I might tell you one day, but...not now. But what happened...it frightened us. Right terrified us, actually, both of us, and we knew that we _had_ to do something, anything, to fix that wrong feeling inside us, or we were going to end up in very bad places. So we decided to separate."

Becker went very still, breath catching, and above his head, Nike might as well have been a statue, her eyes unblinking upon the professor's dæmon. "Sorry, but how does choosing to separate make things okay?" he asked, unable to help himself because that didn't exactly seem to him the most logical answer.

Here, Dìonadair spoke, gently kneading her paws on Cutter's thigh. "We saw it as a test, something that we could do and overcome together, a way to show ourselves that we could handle everything the world gave us," she explained.

"And it wasn't something we did idly. We talked about it for near on a year, wasn't it? And then one night we finally got up the courage and did it," Cutter put in.

He was itching to ask _how,_ how had he been able to, and the professor must've seen it because he asked for Becker, "Where did we go?" Becker nodded. "We used a sanctioned separation lot. There was a military base not far from where we lived then, and in the middle of the night, I snuck out and walked all the way there." Cutter paused again, reaching up to run his fingers through Dìonadair's fur. "I won't lie to you. It hurts, more than anything you've ever experienced. And there are some who can't handle it, either. Whatever the hell is in the ground of those lots, it's not normal stuff. You can _feel_ it when you walk onto one. There's three markers on the ground in the lot. One at each end, one in the dead centre. You both stand in the middle, then you walk to one mark, and your dæmon walks to the other one. You both have to be pulling in order for the bond to properly stretch. It's forty paces, centre to end, but it feels like miles. You'll feel like you're dying, and you might think you will die, but when it's over...once you stand on that end mark and realise what you and she have done together...it's a feeling unlike any other, and your bond will be all the stronger for having gotten through it."

Slowly, Becker sat back into the sofa, hands clasped tightly in his lap. He and Nike had tested the limits of their bond together as kids, like all children did, going to their furthest distance and then rushing back together with great relief. The idea of _purposefully_ stretching out that bond, of walking and knowing that he was taking the risk of potentially becoming Severed, was enormous. But then he felt talons curl into his shoulder, and looked up to see Nike once more perched on him. She squeezed his shoulder with her talons again, very gently. He was struck with a sudden thought and asked, "Sir...how old were you? When you separated?"

"Sixteen," Cutter answered, and Nike clacked her beak sharply, the only outward sign of their shock as Becker's face showed no reaction. Most soldiers didn't attempt separation training until they were a rank or two above Becker, but he'd managed at _sixteen?_ "I know what you're thinking, but...they say the worst thing about separation is the pain. It's the pain that breaks most people. By that point, though, I was no stranger to pain. And looking at you, seeing how you've gotten to where you are as young as you are, I get the feeling that you aren't, either. But listen...it's not for everyone. You can give up whenever you'd like, and if you can't do it, if you get to the separation lot and change your minds...there is no penalty. There's no mark in your record, nothing negative put down on paper. But the important thing is that whatever you do, whether you decide to do it or not, you have to do it _together._ Whatever decision you come to, come to it together." It was considered bad form to address another person's dæmon directly, but Cutter's gaze met Nike's for a bare heartbeat before returning to Becker's. "Is there anything else you wanted to ask?"

"No. Well...yes, actually. You said that before, Dìonadair had been a marten. When _did_ she settle?" Becker asked tentatively.

Cutter grinned. "The night we chose to separate."

He stood and clasped both hands behind his back. Nike was staring at Dìonadair, and he got the feeling that both dæmons were smiling in their own secret way. "Thank you, sir, for telling me this. Explaining why you chose us and what you did..." He paused, uncertain. "It means a lot to us," he settled on at last; Cutter nodded. Becker walked around the sweeping lines of the matrix to the door, feeling her strong talons curl in his shoulder.

Just before he reached the door, the professor said, "And Captain Becker?"

"Sir?"

"My name isn't 'sir.' You can call me Cutter. Or at least Professor, if you must."

He allowed himself a small smile and nodded, opening the door. Once they were in the corridor, he looked up at his dæmon and lightly stroked her steely grey-white breast feathers with the backs of his fingers. Nike dipped her head to nibble his ear affectionately, which she rarely did when they were on duty. "Think we're up for it?" he asked.

"Let's find out," Nike replied, stretching her wings confidently.

Sitting in his office, Cutter listened to the soldier walk away, then looked to Dìonadair. "I like them," she announced, curling up on his lap.

"I do, too."


End file.
